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War and the 
King Trust 

An Address to the 
Anglo-German Club 



By 

AMOS PINCHOT 



aite House, 



War and the King Trust 



A lot of good people seem to have a beautiful faith in war. Editors, 
congressmen, senators, Christian preachers, and Billy Sunday, Theodore 
Roosevelt and others are highly outraged by the suggestion that war 
should end without a knockout. They say they want Germany to be 
spanked, so that she will not try another raid on civilization for genera- 
tions to come. What is more, these good people are sincere about it. 
They are honestly convinced that fighting it out on present lines, if it 
takes all summer and half the young manhood of Europe, is a called-of- 
God proposition. Even the gentleman who spoke at a patriotic society 
luncheon at the Bankers' Club last Thursday and said he had "an abiding 
faith" the war would go on a Toutrance was, I think, entirely sincere, 
notwithstanding the fact that, at the moment, he happens to be making a 
fortune out of war stocks. 

Consequently when the President went up to the capitol and told the 
Senate of his hope for peace without victory, the state of mind of some 
of the gentlemen I have mentioned was genuinely disturbed. Of course, 
they did not distrust Mr. Wilson. They merely said, each in his own 
way, that he was insane, and his message Utopian ; and they immediately 
began to talk about Bunker Hill and Valley Forge, the Mexican War, 
1865 and the Spanish- American controversy. They wondered what was 
the matter with the man who did not believe that the world could still be 
smoothed out with gun powder. 

Unquestionably the President did strike a novel note. For, whether 
we are generally sympathetic with Mr. Wilson or not, we must admit that 
his idea, that the only way to settle the war durably is, so to speak, not 
to settle it, or at least to omit the final rounds of a knock-down and drag- 
out affair, comes to the thorough-going believer in war as something 
bizarre, if not unpatriotic and historically off-color. But times have 
changed considerably since Bunker Hill. Since Bunker Hill, there has 
not only been an alteration in the structure of society, but also a more or 
less radical advance in the means of distribution of thought, and in the 
effectiveness of thought itself; and this has, to some degree at least, 
shifted the balance of power away from physical force toward the realm 
of the mental and spiritual. In fact, ideas are coming into their own. 
In spite of what is going on in Europe, the levers that move the world are 
no longer exclusively in the palms of men of the stone age. 

So, to these gentlemen we may say that, even if there were a true 
analogy between our past wars and the great war today, we would hardly 
be justified in saying that, because war brought fairly lasting peace once, 

3 



it will bring it now. As a matter of fact, however, there is little or no 
analogy. For, in the struggles to which our war-loving friends and news- 
paper writers, signing themselves spirit of 76, etc., call our attention, the 
situation was quite different. The Revolutionary and Civil Wars were 
not between people of alien races, and they were fought on clearly defined 
issues which would have, sooner or later, been decided in the general 
course of education and mutual understanding, even if arms had not been 
resorted to. As for the Mexican War, it was, as General Grant tells us, 
an act of pure aggression on our part, — a land grabbing scheme which 
sowed in Mexico the seeds of hatred that have today blossomed before 
our eyes. And the Spanish-American War ; we can hardly point to it as 
a triumph of justice through arms.- For General Woodford, American 
Minister to Spain, had obtained from the Spanish government acquiescence 
to alTof the United States' demands, when unluckily defective powder 
blew up the magazine of the Maine, and jingoism and journalism did the 
rest. """' 

That Mr. Wilson's plea to the nations to stop the war short of 
decisive victory seems shocking to many good people who retain, from 
the time when our ancestors ate their food alive, a child-like belief in the 
efificacy of the smashing process, is unquestionable. But that it is im- 
practical is untrue. On the contrary, there is no other way to settle the 
war and insure a lasting peace that is practical and based upon a solid 
■"ahd^denronstrabie foundation. I will, therefore, take up the peace-by- 
smashing theory and try to show why, in the case of Europe, it will not 
work. Not as an apologist for Germany, but only as an advocate of doing 
something that will stay done, I will try to point out one reason why it is 
impossible for practical men who understand Germany to believe that 
peace will result from a decisive victory. 

1. Nations and individual men follow the same psychological pro- 
gressions. For instance, the history of the nation, Germany, is paralleled 
with amazing faithfulness by that of the man William the Second ; and in- 
deed by the lives of many men, who, like William, began life handicapped, 
and yet had the vitality and will-power to overcome or compensate for 
early disabilities. Not only do such men and nations often succeed in 
compensating; they frequently end in over-compensating to a point 
where, to all outward appearances, they are stronger and more aggressive 
than they would have been, if at the outset they had started on even 
terms with the rest of the world. 

The boy William was born with a physical inferiority. He was a 
delicate child with a withered arm. When he came to manhood and the 
throne his sense of disability was increased ; Bismarck was master of 
Germany and William was permitted to be Emperor only in name. Then 
William's compensatory process began. In the Austrian controversy, he 
made Bismarck's position untenable ; and the Chancellor resigned, leaving 

4 



him supreme. As for the withered arm, if William could not make it 
sound, he has at least developed a great right arm, and with it lifted so 
terrible a sword that the world has forgotten about the other one. 

2. In early life, Theodore Roosevelt was shelved by bad_ health. 
With a determination we now speak of as characteristic, but which may 
not have been so then, he went West, lived for years the life of the open 
and built up a constitution more than ordinarily robust. He came back, 
went to the legislature, was civil service commissioner, governor, a great 
president, a recipient of the Nobel prize and a writer of sorts. But these 
accomplishments w-ere not enough ; they did not slake Mr. Roosevelt's 
thirst for the purely physical qualities he once lacked and set up as his 
model. They did not literally enough assure him of what he most wanted 
to be told, to wit : that he had compeiisated successfully. Consequently, 
A'Ir. Roosevelt selects other lines of action that emphasize possession of 
physical strength. He goes in for the strenuous life, and becomes our 
main apostle of virility. When occasion offers, he naturally assumes the 
role of the cowboy, because the cowboy is highly symbolic of the vital 
type he once fell short of. Next, in the Spanish War, he appears as a 
rough-rider ; this is a distinct promotion in the scale of virility, the rough- 
rider being in essence the cowboy plus the added feature of participation 
in the virile game of war. Later on, as an explorer, plunging into jungles 
and living among wild men and beasts, he approaches still nearer to the 
primitive male; until finally, in the recent Mexican crisis, Colonel Roos^^ 
velt reaches his apotheosis, for, lo ! he stands before us proposing to raise 
a whole division of cowboys, rough-riders and explorers, and to be 
supreme over this entire congress of virilities in the capacity of Major- 
General. 

3. Page, the American high-jumper of a generation ago, began life 
a cripple. His problem was to walk as other men. But this accomplished, 
he wanted to run, to jump, to jump higher than any man ever jumped, 
and he succeeded. Why? Because a constant vision of the thing beyond, 
soundness of limb, charged his will and created, in his years of invalidity, 
impulses so durable as to still urge him forward after their mission of 
bringing him to equality with other men had long been accomplished. 

4. In his maturity, Nietzsche was Germany's most distinguished 
preacher of aggression ; to him is attributed, rightly or wrongly, much 
of the ithless power-worship of intellectual Germany of today. But 
Nietzs.iie as a child was a weakling. After his father, the pastor of 
Rocken, died, the boy was brought up mainly by grand-parents and female 
relatives. 

By them, as well as by the parochial conventions of a provincial 
village, he was kindly, but none the less cruelly, repressed. Soon in this 
restless, non-conforming spirit the compensatory process commenced. His 
will-to-power philosophy, calling upon mankind to join him in repudiating 

5 



all cultural restraint, expresses the swing of the pendulum from early 
impotence to mastery, from daily repression by elderly female relatives to 
unfettered libertarianism in the world of thought. Like the Kaiser, 
Roosevelt and Page, Nietszche's aggression was rooted in weakness, not 
in strength; like theirs, his insistence on power is reminiscent of a time 
when, in spite of natural capacity, he was shut off from it by very positive 
inhibitions. Like them, too, he sought to be the superman, because he 
once fell so short of the average man, in power and opportunity to func- 
tion. Nietzsche died insane, believing he was God. 

5. Why is Germany aggressive ? Why is she militarist ? Why have 
people who understand Germany little hope of ending her militarism 
through war? And, why are those who want a lasting peace and yet 
protest against an early one — why are those well-meaning believers in the 
healing power of the sword working against the end they have in view? 

Germany has had only a few years of nationality. In 71 Bismarck, 
Moltke and the old Emperor made a unification of unsympathetic, half- 
hostile states. The unification was not a natural growth, not a popular 
movement, but a feat of strength performed by a handful of men who 
said, "Let there be a nation.'' But if the foundations of German unity 
are insecure, the soil in which they were laid is still more so ; from 
the ninth century to the unification, the German story is one of attempted 
■^ffipire that rose, towered and crashed into disorganized fragments. 
In 843, the Treaty of \''erdun made Charlemagne's son ruler of a loosely 
joined empire. By the tenth century it had grown to include what is now 
Germany and also Holland, Belgium, and a part of Poland and Italy. 
Though not a nation in the modern sense, still there was distinct con- 
sciousness of nationalism. Then came disintegration, which continued 
for centuries, not steadily but with a tragic downward sag, until, in the 
Thirty Years War, Germany lost all semblance of nationality ; her popula- 
tion went from twenty to six million ; her people starved and wallowed 
in ignorance ; her princes fled and lived abroad in more civilized courts. 
The project of German nationalism was over for the time being. 

By Frederick the Great's time, reconstruction had begun, but it had 
not gone far. Though he was a Prussian and a Brandenburger, no one 
more frankly than Frederick admitted this ; he said that the Germans 
were still barbarians and the rear-guard of civilization. And, on the 
whole, Germany seems to have agreed with him ; she was unsure of her- 
self, tender of her past, without confidence in the future, and aggressive 
in proportion to her lack of self-confidence. 

Next came the Napoleonic period of humiliation. Bonaparte crushed 
Prussia, made his headquarters in the palaces of the Hohenzollerns ; said 
of the latter and the Prussian aristocracy in general : 'T will make this 
noblesse beg bread in the street," and forced a division of German troops 
to fight in the French army. That success in the Franco-Prussian War 

6 



did not remove from the German soul the humiliation of 1806 is shown 
a hundred years later, when, through the mouth of William the Second, 
Germany is still talking revanche, still proposing to wipe out with blood 
the score chalked up against her honor by Bonaparte. 

6. The psychology of modern Germany has been profoundly in- 
fluenced by her history. A picture of continuing failure, amounting, in 
fact, to a racial tragedy, has entered deeply into G-erman subconscious- 
ness and become a sort of permanent background, against which are 
judged the phenomena of recent times. And Germany's geographical 
position has powerfully reinforced the fear element aroused by her 
history. Germany grew up, like a lonely imaginative child, surrounded 
by menacing giants and ogres. There was Russia to the north, huge, slow- 
moving, drowsy, of unmeasured strength ; some day Russia was sure to 
wake up and move across Europe like a tide. And France to the west 
and south, tempered, flexible, a nation at home with ideas, — the despair 
of raw, unformed Germany. To Germany France has been a country of 
infinite possibilities ; first, because France had her diseases of militarism 
and kuhur under Louis XIV and Napoleon, and reacted from them into 
democracy. And second, because France has gone through the unifying 
process of popular revolution, and by this her people have become 
thoughtful, sure of their fundamentals and extraordinarily competent in 
distinguishing between class aims and popular aims. Germany, on the 
other hand, like the United States, has had no popular revolution, "aF 
least no successful one. The Reformation was not a revolution, not a 
real break for freedom, but a promotion by the clergy and the upper 
middle class of a new set of dogma ; and the peasant uprising which fol- 
lowed it was an unorganized and unsuccessful revolt against the land- 
owning class. 

Coming to the so-called revolution of '48, there is only a flash in the 
pan that resulted in the expulsion from Germany of her most democratic 
spirits, of such men as Carl Schurz, who could not find in Germany a 
home for a freer body of ideas. Germany, like the United States, has 
had no real struggle for democracy, in which the lines between privilege 
and the people, wealth and poverty, were sharply drawn. And her people, 
like ours, have therefore only been half armed against the attacks of 
absolutism. They have none of that immunity against militarism that is 
enjoyed by the French, mainly perhaps on account of France's revolu- 
tions, and also because of the deep currents of democratic thought long 
ago turned into the national consciousness by the writings of a uniquely 
emancipated group of thinkers, including Voltaire, Rabelais, Rousseau 
and Montaigne. 

But more important than the fear and inferiority sense aroused in 
Germany by the somnolent power of Russia and the developed civiliza- 
tion of France, there has been the threat of England — England, master 



of the seas, successful in colonization, unresting in her policy of empire 
and trade supremacy. England most of all has given Germany a sense 
of impotence, loneliness, newness and comparative poverty. 

7. Thus starting from a history that rang the changes on calamity, 
and a geographical position that stimulated the fear complex formed by 
such a history, Germany has unrestingly carried on her compensatory 
struggle; and it has been a successful one, at least in a material sense. 
From Bismarck's time up to the present war, there is a pulling together 
of the states, not a spiritual union, but, at all events, a strong political 
one. Nationalism, driven on by a consciousness of past failure and 
present superficiality, has been cultivated in a subservient people by the 
government, by school and university, until it has become a religion and 
finally a fanaticism. There has been a great industrial renaissance; a 
perfectioned, smooth-functioning state-absolute has arisen; and in the 
last ten years Germany has become the first military power of the world. 
But all this is not enough. As in the case of the Kaiser, Roosevelt, 
Page and Nietzsche, arrival at the point of equality with others has only 
been a signal for departure for goals beyond. Those vital compensatory 
forces, created through centuries of fear and disability, still hold Germany 
and drive her on — to supremacy in arms because she was humbled in 
arms; to supremacy in nationalism because she once had none; to 
supremacy in culture because, while Europe was semi-civilized, she was 
-savage; to world conquest, because she had been taught to see herself 
ringed by hostile nations crouching to spring. 

8. The writer is not pro-German ; he is what is called pro-Ally. He 
loathes the German state, because it forces the individual into a rigid 
government-made mould; he thinks that authority, especially military 
authority, has made Germany a poor place for the average man to live in. 
He believes that the German government has been the main, though not 
the only, aggressor ; that it prepared for and forced war ; that the enslave- 
ment of the Belgians and the Zeppelin raids are atrocities, although, in 
fact, mere fringes of the huge fabric of cruelty woven by the super- 
atrocity of war. Above all, he sees in German militarism a sword over 
peace — a worse menace even than England's navalism or American mili- 
tarism as promoted here by our own absolutists and commercial buc- 
caneers. And, for these very reasons, he looks with dismay at the sheer 
futility of any plan to crush militarism by prolonging the war. 

Extreme pressure from without, fear, humiliation, a virtual repetition 
of old disasters, will only strengthen militarism, justify it, harden 
it, and make the crust of official absolutism that now covers Germany 
so metallic that her democratic impulses will be unable to germinate and 
break through. If there is anything to be learned from the history of 
Germany, or from a study of the psychological cause of the effect we call 
militarism, a crushing victory for the Allies wull accomplish one im- 

8 



portant result, and only one. It will set the stage upon which the old 
progressions from inferiority to compensation, from compensation to 
over-compensation, and from over-compensation to aggression and world 
mastery, will be re-enacted in another tragedy, terrible for both Germany 
and the rest of the world. 

9. But still our trusters in violence are undismayed. They continue 
to assure us that the smashing prescription will do the trick. They are 
particularly anxious to have the war go on, so that the Kaiser and the 
military class may be properly punished; they say they want the King 
trust broken up. They stipulate, too, that Germany shall repent, confess 
her sin and acknowledge the saving grace of countries with more guns 
of heavier calibre. They cannot see that the Kaiser and the military class 
are, like militarism, only surface expressions of something that is going 
on deep in the German soul. They insist that a nation of seventy million 
people can be permanently broken and incapacitated for aggressive war, as 
simply and as satisfactorily as we break men and boys in our prisons and 
reformatories and incapacitate them for rebellion against society. They 
do not take into account the fact that fifteenj^ears from now Germany, 
left with a grudge, will have practically as many men of fighting age as 
she would have had if the war had never happened, and probably a good 
many more than she has today. Apparently, they fail to realize that 
Germany's material resources will not stay crippled, because her landi;. 
and her industries cannot be destroyed and her children will continue to 
grow into men and women. Early peace, they say, would be a calamity, 
because Germany has not yet suffered enough to learn her lesson. The 
loss of seven thousand young men a day, more or less, for two years and 
a half, mourning in almost every home in the empire, hunger, bankruptcy 
and the rest of it — in the eyes of our Christian advocates of dreadfulness, 
these do not seem to add up to enough misery to put the fear of God into 
Germany as completely as they desire. Even though postponing peace 
until victory is won means, as it must, a greater slaughter of the Allies than 
has yet taken place, even if it foreshadows the starvation, at no distant 
time, of the prisoners in the German prison camps, and death by hunger 
and sickness of literally millions of children in the ravaged districts, and a 
continuation of the racking anxiety and despair of millions of women, non- 
combatants and old people at home, and the partings, the emptiness and 
desolation of the last two years prolonged indefinitely into a horrible 
future; even if victory must be purchased at such a price, and notwith- 
standihg the fact that when bought, it can give no shred of assurance 
against the repetition of the whole unparalleled tragedy — our friends, 
faithful to war, do not hesitate. They are willing to stake the future of 
the world on war's exploded rep utation as a peacemaker. 

10. The world is filled with men who believe in force; our laws 
and institutions, our property rights, our economic system, and privilege 

9 



itself, which is the economic expression of violence, is deeply rooted in it. 
We cannot doubt that these people conscientiously believe in force, trust 
it, honor it, and gladly embrace an opportunity of recommending it as a 
sovereign remedy. It is the one great principle of the world that they 
have been taught to confide in and found not wanting. But whether these 
good people are not really a good deal more interested in justifying and 
exalting the force principle, which is woven so intimately into the struc- 
ture of the society in which they live, than they are in ending militarism, 
or bringing about a lasting peace, is a question that we, and perhaps they 
themselves, would have a good deal of difficulty in answering. But still 
we cannot help noticing, for it is significant, that these very people, who 
are most tireless in telling us that the war should go on, so that militarism 
in Germany may be crushed, are also the most tireless in booming militar- 
ism in America. They are preaching the same narrow nationalism, the 
same fear of other nations, the same concentration of power in the mili- 
tary, and the same annulment of individual rights and liberties that was 
promoted in Germany for generations before the war, by German militar- 
ists, by the German clergy, profiteers, politicians and power-preaching 
professors. But here in America they tell us all these things are not for 
aggression, but purely in the interest of national defense. And so it was 
in Germany; and no amount of argument will ever persuade the average 
German that his nation was organized for anything but to repel boarders. 
Xet us not deceive ourselves, America too has her power cult, her Ameri- 
can branch of the King Trust, her class that believes in force because it is 
founded on force, and that instinctively wants to see force made 
triumphant and honorific by being the means of settling the world's prob- 
lems. 

What, then, is the answer to those who expect that a knockout blow, 
that punishment will bring lasting peace and an end to German aggres- 
sion; to men like Colonel Roosevelt, for instance (who, by the way, does 
not seem to have been rendered less aggressive by the fact that, for 
quite awhile now, he has been constrained to take his political bread 
and water off the mantelpiece) ? What shall we say to our bishops, 
munition sellers, amateur soldier men and distinguished lawyer-publicists, 
who tell us that Europe must be bled into lasting tranquillity? To them 
no answer can be made that will carry conviction ; for they do not think 
in terms of history or human psychology, but in those of primal instincts. 
But to the liberal thought of the world, the answer is simple. No matter 
how much she may or may not deserve it, Germany cannot be whipped 
either into impotence or consciousness of her own aggression. The ag- 
gression itself must be attacked through a policy that is understanding of 
its causes. And the first step is to switch the controversy from the 
physical into the realm of reason. 

11. On England mainly devolves the duty of bringing about a settle- 
ment along the lines of President Wilson's suggestion, that is to say, one 

10 



which will take into account the causes of Germany's aggression and pro- 
vide conditions that will tend to end them. England explicitly renounces 
all intention of conquest; she says she only wants to guarantee freedom 
for Europe. And, since she largely controls the credit of the belligerents, 
she can go far toward dictating to her allies the terms of peace. No 
doubt, it will be hard for England to accept as sound the President's 
proposition, that peace must not be preceded by victory. England has 
never been strong at understanding the psychology of situations. This 
was shown in the recent Irish uprising, when she apparently labored 
under the impression that she could stand the idea of Irish nationalism 
up against a wall and shoot it. Like Germany, like Napoleon, but unlike 
Bismarck, England has centred her attention too rigidly on the mechanics 
of international politics. She has not touched the spirit of other peoples ; 
that was why she lost America. What she has accomplished in her con- 
quests and colonies has been by the weight of her wealth and the dogged 
courage of her national character. 

But Eng[an_d is now up against a different problem than India or 
Egypt. In Germany she is dealing with a nation of tremendous vitality, 
power of organization, and fanatical determination not to be the under 
dog. The balance of power plan of an alliance of nations, not to include 
Germany, that will hold German aggression in check after a thorough 
thrashing has been administered, is worse than impractical; it is a- prexu^ 
of psychological error; it is impossible and based on an almost criminal 
disregard of history. It might do if Germany were a country of brown 
or yellow men ; but it will never work with a proud people that has once 
proved its ability, in war and commerce, to hold the world at bay. 

In both America and Europe those who believe in force as the con- 
trolling principle of society are very busy scoffing at the President's 
proposal that all nations shall be members of a league to preserve peace. 
They do not want that ; they want a group of nations, representing a 
majority of power, that will force peace on the rest. Of course, they do. 
Naturally they are hostile to Mr. Wilson's proposal, for between his and 
their's, there is a very fundamental difference, an irreconcilable difference, 
that lies between two diametrically opposing principles. Men divide tem- 
peramentally on an issue like this ; it goes down to their instinctive philos- 
ophy of life. For the balance of power scheme is, in effect, nothing more 
or less than a plan to establish a preferred class of nations which will be 
able, through superior force, to dictate to the other nations outside that 
class. It is simply the application of undemocracy, of privilege on a 
gigantic, international scale, just as the President's proposal is the appli- 
cation of equality and democracy in world relations. 

To the temptation of demanding an international reorganization in 
which they will come in, as it were, on the ground floor, and receive better 
terms than the Central Powers, it is to be hoped England and the allies 
will turn a deaf ear. Certainly their statesmen of vision may be expected 

11 



IpV.^JAJJO': CONGRESS 
015 845 518 3 C 



to see how small will be the hope of permanence in such an arrangement. 

No matter who began the war, no matter how terrible the aggres- 
sions and atrocities and reprisals, there can be no benefit to humanity in 
apportioning the blame, or in making the sins or virtues of nations an 
excuse for inequality of treatment. If there is to be civilization worth 
living in for our children, some one must wipe the slate clean with a 
gesture so noble, so prophetic of an unembittered future, as to give hope 
to the world, and an amnesty to all men, whether saints or sinners. And 
this can only be done by England. It is England's supreme chance for an 
immortal victory, greater than any war. 

Reading between the lines, this seems to be the message of the 
President. If it is impractical, Utopian, visionary, or the effort of a 
man speaking wisdom to unwilling ears, so were other messages that 
have come down to us through the ages. No one needs to be persuaded 
of the unacceptability of the truth. 



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